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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nevvur" data-source="post: 7337512" data-attributes="member: 6783882">An idea for managing the amount of time spent on interacting: there could be smaller voting blocs among the NPCs who share a particular interest. Like maybe there's a group of 3 undecided who need assurances of protection against giants, a group of 4 who are only siding with claimant A because he's bribing them and only need a bigger bribe to switch allegiance, etc. It then becomes a matter of speaking to their representative rather than each member.You should probably still take into account the likelihood of success for any given interaction when determining specific numbers of determined and undetermined voters, and that's what really complicates the matter when trying to arrive at a 'balanced' social challenge. If we assume a 65% success rate (the baseline "average difficulty" success rate baked into 5e maths), the PCs win 99% of the time. Basically, treating the undecided voters as easy to persuade will trivialize the encounter. This is assuming the PCs don't make a claim themselves, by the way.The thing I sense most people are missing in this equation is that the PCs don't really need to persuade any undecided voters who are already on their side. There are confounding elements in play, such as the NPC claimants getting to convert them as well, but to provide the most simplistic view of the problem I see, I'm ignoring that for now. The only actors who matter are the undecided voters who disagree with the PCs' choice. Using the figure of 12 undecided voters who are evenly split, the PCs have already won 11:6, and that's before any attempt to persuade them has occurred. Using 65% success rate, it becomes 16:2.In my estimation, the numbers need to start out stacked against the PCs' candidate. I don't see any other way around it. I would have all (or most) of those undecideds default to voting for a single claimant - the one the PCs haven't chosen. Perhaps he has the strongest claim, even if it's not signficantly stronger than the other claimant's. Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas for ensuring the PCs wouldn't just switch sides once the stronger claim is made known. Moreover, the target success rate for converting undecided voters to the PCs' preference needs to be below 50% or the overall odds of success are far too high. Soooooo, something like this:5 PC votes for claimant A.4 NPC votes for claimant A.4 NPC votes for claimant B.0 undecided NPC votes defaulting to A.12 undecided NPC votes defaulting to B.<10% chance to convert claimant B's hardcore supporters.30% chance to convert the undecided supporters for claimant B.This will give the PCs 0-1 hardcore conversions, and 3-4 undecided conversions, for a total of 12-14 votes (5 PCs, 4 determined, 3-5 converted). They require 13 to win. Clever ideas and strong role play can be rewarded with advantage or other bonuses, increasing the likelihood of conversions. Laid out like this, hopefully you can determine for yourself what's the best number of voters. You can easily decrease the NPC votes defaulting to B for that purpose, or increase those defaulting to A if you don't mind extra NPCs in play.Again, this is all assuming the PCs don't make a claim themselves.(if my math or assumptions appear wrong to anyone, please point it out. A lot of this is coming off the top of my head)(edit: went back to recheck and made some adjustments to illustrate my point)</blockquote>

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